few people give money unless they are askednearly everyone feels good when they give moneylower income people dig deeper and give a higher percentage of their income than high income peoplewhen you ask people you know for a contribution, at least half of them will say yes

Are you still nervous thinking about how you 'should' ask for money, but think you can't?

When organizations talk about pledges, often times they have different meanings. For some, a specific payment promise, such as a fixed amount each month for a year (or in perpetuity) constitutes a pledge. Others believe that any promise to pay is a pledge, whether it’s for a certain amount or a certain timeframe. The dictionary definition of the word pledge is simply a promise to give money. (There are other definitions, but for our purposes we’re focusing on the financial one.) The question remains: when is a pledge not a pledge?

When it comes to putting promises to pay into FundRaiser Software, there are a couple of options. The first is to consider it a later promise to pay. This is good when there isn’t a definitive time frame for the money to be paid. In fact, there often may be some uncertainty about the money to be paid.

There may be times when you want to track the potential giving, either in a possibility or in a place in a sales cycles, for your donors or potential donors. Noting a donor record by the amount that they may be able to give is something that you want to do as well. Keeping notes is okay, and our note fields within FundRaiser are searchable and able to be included in groupings. However, there is an easier way that will create a more uniform way of keeping track of this information across your database.

There’s no doubt that FundRaiser Software is a robust program. As with any program, even if you’ve been using it for a while, there are always new tips and tricks to learn. This is where our wonderful training department can help out.

As part of my training here at FundRaiser support, I attended the training courses (and watched our training videos) that we offer to our customers. While I found each of them informative and helpful in deepening my understanding of the software, I wanted to share with you my three favorite classes.

One of the most attractive features about FundRaiser Software is its ability to hold a lot of information on your organization’s donors. By the time you utilize category codes and handle such things as Campaigns and Events, Memberships, and Pledges, you can have a lot of donor-specific information. Gathering this information into meaningful groups is the power of groupings inside of FundRaiser.

Let’s say you want to see who attended your events, but hasn’t given a donation. You can make a grouping for that. How about someone who is a monthly donor who has never attended any events? That’s right. You can make a grouping for that.

In a recently (Oct. 3, 2014) posted blog by Kim Klein, the question of how to greet donors and prospects in letters and emails is addressed. While the article seems to favor erring on the side of formality, when in doubt, it also recognizes that there are times to be informal, and even quite casual, during correspondence.

In FundRaiser the word processing is built into the program, allowing access to all fields of data for merging into letters as needed. This enables you to write "form" letters that have the personal look and feel that used to be possible only through individually crafted letters. The way you greet people in a letter can be personalized for each name record in FundRaiser, as well.

Tony Poderis's recent blog (July 31st: How Long Should Donors Have to Fulfill Fundraising Pledges?) proposes that the donor should be allowed to set the time limit for fulfilling any pledge they make. Some folks might, at first glance, think this will dramatically increase the amount of work necessary to manage the overall pledge campaign, as well as the individual pledges. With FundRaiser's Pledge Module, available in Select and standard in Professional, this should be of little concern and here is why:

1. Flexibility of pledge length. With FundRaiser, no two pledges have to be the same. You can set defaults that you'd like to use, but you can adjust each pledge, as needed, to suit the donor.

In a recent blog by Tony Poderis, it is suggested that a myriad of things *should* be tracked in order to cultivate donors and prospects more easily and fully. It's further suggested that, in order to be truly successful, an organization will build strong relationships with their top 20% of donors, getting them fully involved in the organization's mission. All of this tracking and relationship-building requires a lot of detailed information about people, and storing it in a manner that can be readily accessed may appear daunting. Let me "undaunt" that appearance with FundRaiser.

Category Codes are the most flexible way to record non-giving aspects of peoples' lives, as I've said numerous times in my blogs over the years, yet some users are still reluctant to utilize them as fully as possible. Maybe they feel the list of codes gets a bit unwieldy, too long, to specific, etc. Or perhaps they don't see the immediate need of tracking so many aspects of a person's life. Hopefully, Tony's blog will give you a better grasp of why this is so necessary. And I've got a couple of suggestions that will make it easier to use a multiplicity of Category Codes.

Kim Klein's blog on Steps for Raising $20,000 is a great article to use to show exactly how FundRaiser can simplify donor management. If you look at the steps suggested to the student in order to raise funds for their trip to Costa Rica, you'll see how each step can be simplified and tracked using FundRaiser.

Database programs are for storing and using informaiton, and we suggest using FundRaiser to store as much informaiton as you need to have for all the aspects of your fundraising efforts. It's not just about donors, although that's certainly a big part, but look at the other aspects to this particular effort.

I am the treasurer of the Spanish Honor Society at my local High School. My goal is to raise approximately $20,000 in order to have all our club members fly to Costa Rica. We plan to volunteer at an orphanage there where we will teach the children English and organize activities for them. The problem is, however, that I have no idea where to start. I know a project of this scale requires more than a bake sale, but what? I understand that you are probably more used to dealing with things of a larger scale, but do you have any tips for the penniless high school student?

With Memorial Day just around the corner, it might be a good time to mention a couple of ways you can keep track of memorial gifts in FundRaiser. We call them "Tribute" gifts, and they can be in memory of departed loved ones, or in honor of living individuals, or even in celebration of some life event or other.

For FundRaiser Professional users, there is a built-in module, appropriately called "Tributes" to handle the recording and subsequent correspondence for these types of gifts. In FundRaiser Select, the Tributes module is available as an "add-on" module for a modest price. But even in Spark, which has no specific facility for tribute tracking, one can devise some practices to follow and report on tribute giving. Let's see how they work.

SHHHHH!! Don't tell anyone I'm giving you this sneak peek, but I feel compelled to let you know just one new layout feature coming in the near future. It won't happen for a month or two, but when it does, you'll be able to take advantage of it right away. The Tony Poderis blog of April 7th got me thinking about this, because it's nice to be able to thank brand new donors in one way, while thanking repeat donors in a whole different way. In fact, one of the points in Tony's blog is to thank donors for past support.

You all know by now (I hope) that you can have as many letter templates set up as you need, for all types of donations, and all types of donors. So, you can have one letter that you send out for a first time donor, and another for a repeat donor, and maybe even another for a long-time frequent giver. One of the things that has been a bit frustrating for some of you is that, while viewing the gifts that you are entering, and trying to determine which template you might want to use, it is not possible to view the giving history of the donor.

In this weeks' blog by Tony Poderis, entitled "Going Where Your Donors Are", there is a hint of the types of extra information your may want to keep on your major donors. In past blogs, I have tried to help explain some of the ways you can keep, and retrieve, various information about your donors, but it might be helpful to give you a more well-defined view. Please keep in mind: there is no single answer. These are just my suggestions.

Keep general information in the fields provided, so much as possible. The idea is to minimize the amount and type of data stared in "odd" locations, so that it is less likely to be overlooked when needed.

In this week's Tony Poderis blog, the focus is inviiting donors to events that they might not "normally" be invited to attend. Any time we are faced with selecting a portion of our donor database, we should be thinking "Groupings". And any time we think "Groupings", we should take a few moments to consider what criteria will be used for the group of names we have in mind. One simple, yet effective, method of consideration is to write a concise, but complete, sentence describing who it is that we are trying to target.

Any data can be used

Since we can use virtually any information that is stored in our records, we don't really need to focus on the data to make our "selection sentence". It may be as simple as: "I want all the people who have given in the past six months". But be aware that a simple statement may not be complete. What if a donor has died since they last gave? What if a donor has no address, no phone, and no email on record? What if they have been designated as someone who NEVER wants to receive any solicitations from you? So maybe the original statement might become more like: "I want all live donors who gave in the past six months, so long as we can contact them and they haven't opted out of such contact". Not so concise, but more specific, and more likely to give you the results you want.

In Sasha's blog this week, Julie, at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center, explains how they use FundRaiser Professional's Campaign Management section to keep track of return on investment (ROI) for various events, as well as keeping track of responses to mailings, like newsletters. But what if you don't have Professional? Can you work around that limitation to get a better picture of ROI and similar characteristics of your campaigns? Well, the answer is "yes", you can, but it may take a bit more creative thought and planning on your part. Here are a few tips to help:

1. ROI is a simple math problem... honestly

So, how simple is it? Well, it's just a matter of taking the expenses involved in a fund raising effort (whether a mailing, physical event, or advertising, etc.) and subtracting them from the donations derived from that effort. Even with Campaign Management, you need to know the total expenses in order to "plug in" that amount to the event page. In other words, then, ROI = Income, less Expenses: ROI = I - E

This week's guest blog, by Tony Poderis, suggest that, in a capital campaign, fully one third of your goal should be met by only 10 to 15 donors, and that the next third will be met by another 75 to 100 donors. While you may have a good idea who those top donors are, it would be asking a bit much that you also, off the top of your head, know who those next hundred top donors might be. So here are a few ideas that can help:

1. Use the Donor List Report in Amount Order

The Donor List report can be set up to list donors in order of their giving amounts, with the largest donors always at the top of the list. You can limit the range of gifts in many ways, to consider only monetary gifts, for instance, or to look at just a certain time period in the recent past. And, when you are previewing the report, you can choose to print only the first few pages (or whatever number you need) to get the top 115 or so donor names, based on your selection criteria.

In Sasha's recent blog on Pledge Management, BRING Recycling's FundRaiser user mentions several points in passing that could use some emphasis. One such point is tracking reminders. While it's easy to set up FundRaiser to send reminder letters to all those whose payments are coming due, or to send overdue letters to those whose payments are past due, it's not always so easy to remember to tell FundRaiser to carry out the plan. Very little is fully automated in FundRaiser, simply to prevent things from happening that you may not be ready to handle. Everything is "semi-automatic", in that you set up the chain of events ahead of time, but still have to "push start", or "yell 'GO!'" to get things moving. So setting up a Staff Tickle (Windows | Staff Tickle) as a nudge to get you moving is a great idea. You don't need a new reminder each month, since you can simply change the DO date once you've completed this month's reminder letters. And you can have separate tickles for reminders, overdues, or long overdue letters, too.

2. Overdue notices as secondary reminders

Most people associate overdue notices with those nasty reminders one might get if they've missed paying a utility bill at some time. Often those types of notices are quite aggressive and downright antagonizing, using verbiage that only the most callous of bill collectors might use. This is not, of course, the way we want to treat our donors, and therefore is not the way we want to use our overdue notices. Since you create these letter templates in FundRaiser's word processor, you can have them say pretty much anything you want. They can include the last payment date/amount, for instance, or the total that was pledged and how much has been paid to date. And you'll certainly want to remind the pledger of what has been done so far and has yet to be done to complete the task for which the money is being collected. All this can be done in a light, non-demanding, inclusive tone, since you want them as a part of your team, no just for their next payment. Better to build relationships based on mutually shared goals than to concentrate on a single payment.

In Kim Klein's blog article this month, she explains what the term LYBUNT means, which is a good thing, but there is another that is used in FundRaiser we need to know, too: SYBUNT. SYBUNT is similar to LYBUNT, but reaches further into a lapsed donor's past. A SYBUNT has given "Some Year But Not This". You can find both of these terms scattered throughout FundRaiser: in the "WHO" section of reports and mass mailings (in the "MasterFile" dropdown), the "Common Patterns" section of creating a Grouping, and elsewhere. They are just easier ways to describe certain donor situations.

Precisely, Generally Speaking

Once you know the definitions, you may run into another situation due to the business world view that there are two distinct types of years: calendar and fiscal (which FundRaiser calls "Reporting" year). FundRaiser's Reporting year is, by default, set to the calendar year, but can be changed to coincide with the fiscal year your organization uses for accounting purposes. It's changed in the Options, General, Printing menu, and requires that you set the beginning month of the yearly period you want to consider for your Reporting year. Be aware that, if you make a change here, you will need to run the Rebuild Statistics Page Data utility (in the Utilities menu) in order to make certain all the yearly totals reflect your reporting year, and that people are able to be put properly in their LYBUNT and SYBUNT places.